Wednesday, August 28, 2024

Chesterton and Education: A Talk

Readers of this blog are invited to a talk by Emily de Rotstein on “Celebrating 150 years: How GK Chesterton continues to ‘evangelise’ through education”.

Saturday 7th September, 12 pm
Central Catholic Library
74 Merrion Square, Dublin 2


Emily de Rotstein serves as Executive Director of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, a worldwide lay apostolate established in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The mission of the Society is to evangelise through education, inspiring people to live joyful, holy lives, with G.K. Chesterton as a model of lay spirituality.

The Society runs the Chesterton Schools Network, which involves more than 60 Catholic schools in the US and abroad. (See https://chestertonschoolsnetwork.org )

Emily served as a Board member and founding Executive Director of the first Chesterton Academy, and later helped launch the Chesterton Schools Network. Prior to Chesterton, she served as vice president of marketing of Aveso Displays, a venture-backed flexible electronic display company she helped spin out of The Dow Chemical Company. She holds a BA from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and is a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

As seats are limited, please reserve your place writing to irishchesterton@gmail.com



A Horror Story

Would you like to read an original horror story I've just written?

It involves an attic, a diary, and a face from the distant past. That kind of thing. It's 3,500 words long.

If so, please email me at Maolsheachlann@gmail.com.

Tuesday, August 27, 2024

An Exciting Announcement from Toomey Audio-Visual

I received this email sixteen hours ago:

Dear Customer,

On behalf of Toomey Audio Visual, I wanted to reach out to you with some exciting company news – we have recently been acquired by Stacked Group. Should you not be familiar, Stacked is one of Ireland’s leading suppliers of AV & Digital Signage, IT Hardware, Managed Print Services and Workplace Supplies. The company was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in the Red Cow Dublin, with an all-Ireland presence and over 85 local staff members.

The acquisition is strategically well-timed and will help to further enhance the service and product offerings to our clients. We believe that Toomey AV is very closely aligned with the Stacked Group in a number of critical areas, particularly in terms of professionalism, experience, service and expertise.

The acquisition will help to ensure that we can uphold our commitment to delivering top-tier Audio-Visual services to our clients based on our 55+ years of experience, whilst leveraging Stacked Group's scale, expertise, additional services and wider solutions.

Both the teams at Toomey AV and Stacked are excited about this next chapter and look forward to joining forces to offer our customers an excellent product offering.

Should you have any questions on how this may impact our relationship moving forward, please do not hesitate to contact us on 01 4660515.


Obviously, this is important news in itself, and I'd like to extend my hugest congratulations to both Toomey Audio Visual and Stacked on the happy nuptials.

But why do I mention it?

Well, because I've been receiving Toomey Audio-Visual promotional emails for years. I can find evidence going back to 2017, when I mentioned it on Facebook, but it was already a tradition by then. (I clear out my inbox occasionally.)

The truth is, I feel weirdly sentimental about the strangest things. I don't know how I first started getting promotional emails from them. But something stopped me from unsubscribing, though I've unsubscribed from tons of other mailing lists. Maybe it's because I like the name "Toomey".

They also email me a reasonable amount of times. I think we should be pretty tolerant about advertising and promotion, since it's what keeps the wheels of our society turning. (I write about this here, in case anyone cares.) But there's an implicit contract. Don't BLITZ me with emails. Toomey don't, and so I am happy to keep getting them. I might even buy one of their products one day!

I'm a bit confused by the fact that Stacked Group is headquartered in the Red Cow, though. Isn't that a pub? I rather like the idea of a company having their headquarters in a pub, although of course I know I must be misunderstanding something.

I really think there should be ceremonies for acquisitions and mergers. I don't mean a photo-op where somebody signs a piece of paper and there's a mascot or a big helium balloon or something cheesy like that. There should be a proper ceremony, like a wedding. Both CEOs should make public vows, dressed in ceremonial robes. Why can't we drape contemporary things in time-honoured forms?

Friday, August 23, 2024

The Poetry of Words and Phrases

The miracle of language never ceases to beguile me. With my tongue, lips and vocal chords, I can create vibrations in the air which, when they reach your ear, are decoded into ideas and pictures and emotions. This process, already magical and wondrous, can be captured by words on a page-- so that words can travel over continents and through the ages. Every now and again, the whole phenomenon strikes me with fresh wonder.

I've written a lot about poetry on this blog. People have given various definitions of poetry, but one of the more memorable ones is "the best words in the best order". In a way, though, I think words are a sort of poetry even before they're put into any order. You might even say that every word is a poem in itself, although "detergent" and "update" aren't particularly lyrical. (Ironically, the word "poetry" isn't inherently poetic, in my view.)

On the other hand, many words are inherently poetical. Others are  more subjectively appealing.

What sort of words are inherently appealing? Well, the example that comes to my mind most readily are the names of gemstones: sapphire, amethyst, aquamarine, chalcedony, emerald, obsidian, and so forth. Now, you might say these words are appealing because of their association with the gemstones they describe, but I think that's only part of it. And quite often I have no image or knowledge of a particular gemstone and I still find the word poetic.

Wilde's masterpiece of decadent poetry "The Sphinx" draws lavishly on these poetic names:

On pearl and porphyry pedestalled he was too bright to look upon:
For on his ivory breast there shone the wondrous ocean-emerald.

(There's a lot more where that comes from.)

This particular strain of poetry is also to be found in the Bible, particularly the Book of Revelation's description of the walls of the New Jerusalem: "The first foundation was jasper. The second was sapphire. The third was chalcedony. The fourth was emerald. The fifth was sardonyx. The sixth was sardius. The seventh was chrysolite. The eighth was beryl. The ninth was topaz. The tenth was chrysoprasus. The eleventh was jacinth. The twelfth was amethyst."

I'm guessing that many of these terms come from Latin and Greek, which perhaps give them that flavour of the exotic, antique and classical from which much of the poetry derives.

Colours and hues often have very poetic names, as well: indigo, heliotrope, burgundy, onyx, cerulean, turquoise, aquamarine, magenta.

Funnily enough, I would make the argument that many diseases have perversely appealing names: gonorrhea, chlamydia, rubella, melanoma, meningitis, and so forth. (You may not agree on that, though).

Another class of words that seem to be inherently poetic, although I think this certainly has a lot to do with meaning as with sound, involve faintness or obscurity: silhouette, whisper, echo, shadow, ghostly, phantasmagoric, rumour, shimmer, flicker, and so forth.


I could go on with lists of word-groups that seem to be generally appealing, but I'll move on to words and phrases that appeal especially to me.

One of my very favourite words is "lobby", and another is "foyer". Of course, "foyer" has a bit of a French glamour to it, but I think the main reason I love both these words is because they describe liminal spaces. I also love (to varying degrees) corridor, plaza, mezzanine, mall, street, alleyway, and avenue. I feel I should include "attic" in this list, even though it's not a liminal space in the same sense as the others; it's not a "between" place like the others. But it's liminal in another way, although it's hard to put my finger on its liminality. (This article addresses this very subject, although it's a bit too woke for my taste.)

Why do I like terms for liminal spaces so much? It's hard to say. There's something very exciting about a liminal space, especially one that is a mixture of "inside" and "outside". All life, all drama is lived in the space between me and you, us and them. Public or semi-public places seem ripe for this drama.

A final place-word which appeals to me enormously, even though it's not really liminal, except insofar as every place could be liminal in some way: canteen (as in, a cafeteria). I love the word canteen. It's so cheerful, down-to-earth, unpretentious, and redolent of a collective life of some kind. I like restaurants which are more like canteens, such as the restaurant in IKEA.


Here's a round-up of some other words I especially love: kaleidoscope, sepia, merry-go-round, horizon, gossamer, alabaster, brandy. I could add many, many more, and I probably will.

Poetry has already begun, in the more conventional sense, when we put words together. So perhaps it's legitimate to say that phrases are already poems, ready-made poems, as it were.

Finally, a list of phrases that excite me (mostly quarried from a previous post):

Softly-falling snow.
The cold light of day (which is supposed to be sobering, but which I find reassuring).
Deep waters.
Dizzy heights.
The morning after the night before.
Down memory lane.
The silver screen.
Till the cows come home.
All human life is there.
Blue moon. (I'm told the song of this title was my mother's party piece.)
The dead of night (also the title of one of my favourite films, Dead of Night from 1945).
The middle of nowhere.
The back of beyond.
In at the deep end.
Burning the midnight oil.
The last bus home.
Night train. (There was a radio show with this title in my childhood, which was broadcast all night long-- or at least, that's the impression I got.)
The graveyard shift.
The old, old story.
The small hours.
The wee hours.
Any phrase involving "country", in this sense: bandit country, cowboy country, gator country, Brontë country, Kavanagh country, etc.

What are some of your favourite words and phrases? No, really, tell me!

Thursday, August 15, 2024

A Review of Lynn Connolly's "The Mun" (Part One)

Last night I dreamt I went to Ballymun again.

Well, not really. I can't remember what I dreamt about last night. But I often do dream I'm back in Ballymun. Not just in Ballymun, but in Ballymun as it used to be, the Ballymun I grew up in, back in the eighties and early nineties.

Although even that's not quite true. Generally, the Ballymun I dream about is an imaginative reworking of that "classic" Ballymun; sometimes a very imaginative reworking. I have a recurring dream about a sort of space-age Ballymun, when the flats have been transformed into gleaming white indoor cities with all sorts of amenities.

Other times I dream about trying to get back up the stairs to 62 Sillogue Road, the seventh-floor flat where I lived the first twenty-three years of my life. Sometimes the last flight of stairs are crumbling away, or have already crumbled away. Sometimes the journey up the fourteen flights is nerve-wracking, since there's all sorts of bedlam going on between me and my destination.

You get the point. Which is that memories, just like dreams, are subjective. Nobody experiences anything exactly the same way.

Bear this in mind as I write this review of The Mun: Growing up in Ballymun by Lynn Connolly (Gill & MacMillan, 2006). 

First things first: the book is excellent, a highly entertaining, touching, and frequently hilarious first-person account of life in this very distinctive suburb of Dublin. It's written without a hint of political correctness (thank God), and I zipped through it in one evening and one morning. (I'm not a fast reader.) I'll admit I did skim through one or two chapters which were of less interest to me, so forgive me if I haven't got the best fix on some of the details. (Which means, please don't correct me on them; I'm more interested in the general gist of the book.)

I've known about this book for ages (it's almost twenty years old), but I've avoided it. I thought it was going to be politically correct. And in some strange way, I didn't feel ready to read it until now.

And when I did finally read it, I felt a lot of conflicting emotions. There's much talk these days about FOMO: Fear of Missing Out. All my life I've suffered from a variation of this: I'll call it FOHMO (Fretting Over Having Missed Out).

My FOHMO complex was fully activated as I read The Mun. You see, Lynn Connolly grew up in Ballymun in the early seventies, whereas I was born in 1977. The Ballymun I knew was eighties and nineties Ballymun. And, as The Mun explains, they were very different experiences.

Ballymun was built in the mid-sixties and it was considered a model housing estate. It was clean, it had relatively good amenities (though not all it had been promised), and it was full of young families who were delighted to get out of the tenement housing many had been living in. As Connolly describes it, the tenants of the new Ballymun worked together to keep the common areas clean, watched over each others' children, and enjoyed a vibrant social life together-- in Ballymun itself, crucially, especially in its two pubs the Penthouse and the Towers.

Things changed in the eighties, as the book chronicles very vividly. Dublin Corporation (who don't come out this book at all well) began to use Ballymun as a destination for all of their "problem" tenants. The struggle to keep common areas clean became more difficult and people eventually gave up. Crime, vandalism, and-- worst of all-- the drugs epidemic took hold. Some people began to put iron bars in front of their windows and doors.

My family lived in Ballymun from the beginning, so I heard all about the good times. But, by the time I became aware of the world around me (which was later than with most kids), the bad days of Ballymun were well and truly underway.

I was very conscious of this decline, and I felt cheated to have come along at the wrong time. Being a kid, it wasn't (for me) so much about the open drug-dealing that I witnessed in the staircases, the constantly broken lifts, the indescribable vandalism (which I will try to describe), or the poverty. I was a kid and I took all that in my stride.

No, what got me was that I missed out on all the fun. I was constantly hearing stories of fun and festivity in the early days of the 'Mun. The whole atmosphere seems to have changed between the seventies and eighties. Even photographs bear this out. You can see how much cleaner Ballymun was in the old black and white photos. There's no evidence of vandalism, people are smiling and happy, and people are together. In colour photographs from the eighties, everything looks different; you can see the graffiti and grime, people generally look less happy, and they are literally standing further away from each other. Or so it always seemed to me.

My own experienced was coloured by two important facts, apart from coming along in the eighties.

First off, my father was a community activist, Peadar Kelly. (I use "Ó Ceallaigh" because "Maolsheachlann Kelly" just sounds weird.) He played a major role in the history of Ballymun. He edited the community newspaper/magazine The Ballymun News, he helped set up the Ballymun Workman's Club (fleetingly mentioned in Connolly's memoir), he helped found the Irish language school I attended (Scoil an tSeachtar Laoch, which sounds like it was way better from the English-language schools in Ballymun) and...well, a whole lot of other things.

So I heard a lot about Ballymun and the history of Ballymun in my home. Did I ever!

Secondly, I was a very shy and withdrawn kid. I didn't "mix" (to use a word I came to hate) for a long time. So I wasn't in the thick of things in Ballymun even in the eighties. In the nineties, I was a bit more outgoing, and played soccer (just kickarounds) with local kids, getting to know them fairly well. This definitely coloured my view of things.

Connolly's view of kids in Ballymun, even in the eighties, is that they were mostly good-natured, but got into mischief out of a desire for fun and excitement. To me, Ballymun often seemed more like Lord of the Flies. A lot of kids (mostly boys, but some girls) were feral. I got beaten up twice, once pretty badly. The humiliation was worse than the experience itself. Now, not all kids were like that, but quite a lot of them were.

I said I would try to describe the vandalism in Ballymun as I was growing up. It was breathtaking. The omnipresent graffiti was the least of it (I rather liked that). People would frequently urinate in the lifts, burn rubbish in the rubbish chutes, and tear down trees. It seemed to me that everything that could be smashed, pretty much, was smashed.

For instance: Connolly describes how the entry to the fifteen-storey flats originally had thick wooden doors, which were one-by-one ripped from their hinges. (She says she knew somebody who made and sold coffee-tables from them, which is at least better than pointless destruction.) I never knew of their existence. I remember the ground floor landing of my own block of flats had a sort of soft plaster ceiling. Literally overnight, this became punctured all over, when it became a craze for kids to throw L-shaped metal brackets up into it. I remember this very vividly.

And yet, and yet...

And yet, for all the feral kids, and the vandalism, and the sense of being a Johnny-come-lately, I have many golden memories, memories of Ballymun, as well.

First off: it was a place. That might be a strange thing to say. But it seems to me that we are all increasingly living in a sort of no-place ("he's a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land"). The suburbs are extending over the world, and look increasingly samey. Countries themselves look increasingly samey.

Ballymun had a very strong sense of identity. Kids on school trips used to sing: "We're from Ballymun, Bally-ally-allymun." Well, maybe kids everywhere sung their own equivalent of that, but everybody had heard about Ballymun. Even when it appeared on TV, it was instantly recognizable. You could see it from the planes landing and taking off at Dublin airport (my father actually thought that was the idea-- the Powers That Be wanted to show off how modern we were to international visitors.)

Ballymun was even more distinctive than I realised at the time. As Connolly explains at one point: "In the early 1980s there were around twelve thousand under-eighteens living in Ballymun; a vastly greater saturation of teens than in any other area of Ireland". In fact, I think she might be understating it; I read somewhere that Ballymun had the youngest population in the whole EEC (precursor of the EU) at this time.

As well as taking pride in a strong sense of identity, I had happy particular memories, many of which find echoes in Connolly's memoir.

About Halloween, she says: "Hallowe'en was a magical time in Ballymun. All the kids would get dressed up and go trick-or-treating. Then there would be the parties for the kids with apple-bopping, etc. And no Hallowe'en would be complete without a barmbrack. At Hallowe'en in Ballymun you would find things in your barmbrack that the EU have probably since prohibited as a choking risk. Wrapped in greaseproof paper there would be several items that told your fortune... A stick-- meaning you would grow up to be either a wife-beater or a beaten wife; a ring (always popular with the girls) which meant you would marry; a dry pea-- you would never go hungry... I can't imagine for a moment these prophecies were ever taken seriously, kids would just laugh and gently tease the friend who was growing up to be beaten."

Halloween in Ballymun! There was nothing like it. I remember the stockpiling of woods, for the various different bonfires, would go on for weeks. As far as I remember, these were entirely organised by kids, though I think adults stepped in at the building stage. The fire would begin to be built in the afternoon and would be reminiscent of The Wicker Man by the time it was lit. As mentioned before, we lived on the seventh floor (which was actually the eighth floor, since there was a ground floor). The bonfire was built, year after year, in the field directly in front of our block of flats, and the sparks would fly up to our windows. I'm even told the windows themselves would be warm to the touch, though I don't remember that.

I'm surprised Connolly uses the term "trick or treat". It was "Help the Halloween party!" that kids would say when they came knocking on Halloween.

As for the fireworks...it was like a warzone, without the fatalities. I've been in America on the Fourth of July. It's impressive, but it still falls short of a Ballymun Halloween in my childhood-- not in quality, of course, but in sheer quantity.

It's plain that this review is going to take more than one blog post. I expect it's going to be a whole series. Watch this space.

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Monday, August 12, 2024

Why I Am a Monarchist

I have no ear for tales of kings
No eye for gorgeous palaces.
All I can see is squandering
Of little peoples’ pittances.

Pennants and crests are pretty sights
But never could I understand
Their hues reserved for lords and knights
And not the diggers of the land.

And though I'd fall on bended knee
For any noble, prince, or squire,
I'd do it for sheer chivalry
And not to lift him any higher.

And yet, for all my scorn for pomp,
My fealty to the common man
The muscles in my throat still clamp
At that mere word “republican”.

Not for the man of flesh-and-blood
Who parks his rump upon a throne
But for the monarch made of wood,
The princess of a painted town.

Here's to the king, God bless his soul,
Because King Arthur wore a crown
And King Canute and Old King Cole
And the King's Arms in every town.

Here's to the King, whose coat of arms
Look splendid on the pickle jar.
Here's to the Queen, whose lambent charms
Are most apparent from afar.

You tell me that a man's a man;
Amen to that! A man can stand
(As some mere watchword never can)
For all the men of all the land.

Hurray for Liberty, indeed,
But Liberty was never drunk
Or rode upon a chestnut steed
Or had to take the lower bunk.

For all the pomp, for all the sham,
My heart still feels that ancient tug–
Not for the glitz of Buckingham
But the chipped coronation mug.